This article is not aiming to attack anyone, but aims to show that when you look at multiple bills, and what they are doing, you begin to see a big picture concerning sex ed here and around the globe; it’s about bills that are perhaps unintentionally pushing immorality in the form of education through common, global “comprehensive sexuality standards”; it’s about a Utah bill pushing gay advocacy on children in the guise of kindness toward gays; it’s about a good bill on informed consent to educate pregnant women about abortion before they abort.

It might seem that these things are unrelated. But they’re not. They are all aligned to the globalist (UN) agenda –and monied lobbying groups and governments far from Utah do want to see Utah fall like a domino into line with their version of “rights” and “education”.

Before I ask you to consider helping to stop SB196, the “advocacy of homosexuality to children” bill; and before I (relatedly, belatedly) report about the happy death of HB215 last month (that was to add erotic CSE sex standards, detailed in Comprehensive Sexuality Education Standards (CSE), here’s a frame of reference. It’s a video clip that shows the divide in Utah’s legislature on reproduction and sex ed issues. Click here.

Fast forward to 1:30 -ish on the video. Representative Stratton speaks for the bill (at 1:30) which is written to promote informed consent of pregnant mothers prior to aborting babies. It’s a good bill. Then Representative King speaks against Stratton’s bill. (See 1:38 – one hour, thirty eight minutes)

At first, King sounds calm and almost reasonable.

Around 1:40 King’s tone turns and he says, “I don’t want to hear anyone stand up and talk to me about “babies” or killing babies,” he says, “What we are talking about are zygotes, embryos, and fetuses… When I hear an individual refer to an unborn child as a baby, I know immediately they are not to be taken seriously.”

This is who we are dealing with: legislators who won’t call abortion a death, or fetuses, humans.

I was present last year. There was an overflowing education committee room, lines and lines of people queuing up to speak for and against it, and, thankfully, that bill died in the committee’s vote.

One year later (a few weeks ago) again, the legislative education committee room was packed to standing room, with overflow rooms and online audiences receiving video or audio. Many in the crowd wore red to signify “STOP CSE” (Stop Comprehensive Sexuality Education). The bad bill was CSE-promoting, contraceptives-for-kids-promoting, parental consent-deletingHB 215.

This meeting went on for about four hours. As in the previous year, there were lines and lines of people queuing up to testify both for and against the bill. It felt like a miracle when the bill failed in the vote.

We knew it was only a temporary miracle: the national, big-monied lobbying groups, such as Planned Parenthood, and the liberal, progressive think tanks, and the United Nations itself, are relentlessly pushing CSE in every state. Bet money, if you are a gambler, that its core principles (anti-life, anti-morality) will be back every year, slid into multiple forms of bills. But we didn’t know how temporary.

Refresher: The national CSE standards call for children as young as third grade (nine years of age) to describe male and female reproductive anatomy and functions; to describe the changes of puberty; and to “define sexual orientation as the romantic attraction of an individual to someone of the same gender or a different gender.” And that’s just for nine year olds. It gets more inappropriate for older children. See: National Sexuality Education Standards

In their testimonies, some of the pro-CSE speakers at the recent hearing said that they had been raped –as a direct result of lack of good sex ed. They claimed that Utah doesn’t have thorough sex ed. But they must not have been taught in Utah schools; read the sex ed standards posted at USOE.

Interestingly, some of the anti-CSE testifiers were also rape victims. The rape-prevention argument for CSE thus bombed. (Is it remotely logical that teachers’ advocacy of eroticism and masturbation (topics which CSE standards advocate as “rights of a child”) would be likely to cause –as soon as prevent– the horror of rape?)

It simply is not true that Utah’s sex ed standards are lacking substance or detail or science. In Utah’s current, extremely thorough, sex ed standards and teacher/parent resource guides, I see nothing skipped over, nothing shallow, unscientific, sloppy or prudish.

It is very simple to document for yourself: just lift terms out of Rep. King’s bill, and do an internet search to see how many far-left organizations and universities have used and coined, in their publications and initiatives, the same almost-bland sounding terms. Trace, for example, the scholarly articles and the money trails for groups publishing articles on “comprehensive sexuality” and “positive youth development”)

What Rep. King and CSE promoters don’t like about Utah’s sex ed standards is probably, simply this:

4. The advocacy of sexual relations outside of marriage or sexual promiscuity”.

Each of those four things are fully promoted by CSE.

Need evidence? Watch the “War on Children” video. Read the CSE standards of FoSE and SIECUS here. Visit the United Nations’ website, which openly states that it works through governments [people like Representative King] to push its values on the entire world.

It admits: “UNFPA works with governments to implement comprehensive sexuality education, both in schools and through community-based training and outreach. UNFPA also promotes policies for, and investment in, sexuality education programmes that meet internationally agreed standards.”

Internationally agreed?

Have you agreed to CSE? Has our entire country, our entire world? Do you even know what’s written in CSE?

I do.

This fight is not over.

How relieved we felt, a few weeks ago, when the vote was taken and King’s CSE bill died. We thought we had a break until next year’s session.

We were wrong to think we had a year of rest.

RIGHT NOW, there’s another bill, SB196, working its way through the legislature –right now– that has already unanimously passed a Senate ed committee. It will remove point #2 above: “the advocacy of homosexuality”.

KSL reported that SB 196 unanimously passed the ed committee, even though it removed the prohibition against Utah teachers advocating for homosexual lifestyles for Utah children.

News flash: Advocacy of homosexuality is not sex ed. It’s advocacy!

Education about homosexuality, or teaching kids kindness toward homosexual individuals, is not the same thing as having teachers advocate engagement in homosexual behavior, to children.

I don’t get it. Do you? What are the weights and measures– what do we prioritize: protecting and educating kids, or fearing law suits?

And in my estimation, the law suit is a brain dead argument.

The Salt Lake Tribune reported that the law suit (which supposedly spurred the unanimous yes vote on bill 196) said:

“These laws prevent presentation of accurate information concerning lesbian, gay, bisexual people in health classes and other classes, even when such information serves important educational purposes, while imposing no similar restriction on discussion of heterosexuality”.

That’s not true. Utah law does not prevent presentation of accurate information; in fact, USOE standards explicitly say that sex ed includes discussion of homosexuality. The laws do say that teachers cannot advocate for homosexual nor for heterosexual promiscuity. Advocacy rightly is prohibited in schools. It’s not a school’s job to advocate, but to teach academics and health.

More ridiculousness in the suit: the Tribune reported that the lawsuit claimed that there were no similar bans applying to clubs about heterosexuality, heterosexual persons or heterosexual issues, and that “that discrimination harms LGBT students… preventing them from participating equally in student clubs, stigmatizing them as inferior an unequal.”

Not true. Teachers are not permitted to advocate for heterosexual promiscuity, either.

Some people claim that the legalization of gay marriage necessitates teachers advocating gay lifestyles in schools. That makes no sense to me.

What will teachers advocate for next, if this passes? Pedophilia, so that pedophiles can have an after-school club, too? Where do we draw a line?

All human beings should support and practice advocacy for special needs children, and for any individual being bullied, whether he/she is gay or is of an ethnic or religious minority, or is obese, or is blind, or is anything else that others may bully. What I do not support is party-line advocacy of participation in a very controversial, potentially dangerous sexual behavior to young people who are, by law, in school.

If you live it Utah, and if you think that altering the language to make advocating for homosexual behavior is wrong, please asking the representatives to say “no way” on SB 196.

Protect kids! Stop SB196 now. Then, work to educate others to stop CSE in all its forms.

I gave the speech below, at the Heber City council meeting tonight, asking the council not to adoptCommunities that Care, right after three state employees gave speeches encouraging the city to adopt Communities That Care.

1. We know so little about the obligations of joining this coalition. The general public cannot get online access to read the grant itself. But what is it, really, other than $10,000 of our federal taxes returned to us?

I used to write grants professionally, full time, for a consortium of charter schools in Utah County. As a grant writer, I learned that federal grants are extremely bureaucratic and agenda-driven. I learned to apply for private grants from local corporations instead.

Grants are not Christmas presents or free money without strings attached. Grants come with obligations. What are the CTC obligations? Has Heber City had a professional grant writer or lawyer assess the application’s obligations fully? I suggest Heber refrain from “getting married” to CTC, this federally operated coalition, before we “date” it thoroughly.

The question is not whether or not some Heber City youth have serious problems that need our help. (We do have great programs in place already that we are underutilizing; I’ll address them llater. ) The question is whether we want/need the federal supervision and lack of flexibility that always comes with federal money and “free training.”

2. University of Kansas has done a study of the pros and cons of CTC. Citing Univ. Kansas:

– CTC is a copyrighted, structured process. It was previously private, owned by the Channing-Bete Corporation, but has been sold to the federal government.

– University of Kansas calls the CTC approach “only inclusive and participatory for certain people,” and notes that
“While it claims to involve the whole community, the formal CTC approach is actually top-down, starting with a small number of “key community leaders.” These leaders who may or may not be representative of the whole community in terms of race, socioeconomic class, or interests – then “invite” other participants “from all sectors” to make up a community board of 30. The reality is that they’ll usually invite people they know, who are apt to be much like them and may not represent the true diversity of the community.”

Especially in a large community, it takes research to know whom to include, and 30 may be too small a number to be truly representative of all sectors. Furthermore, some sectors – youth themselves, for instance, or single parents on welfare – are unlikely to be included unless specifically targeted by the process. And if the “key community leaders” see themselves as leading the process, its participatory nature can go out the window.

–CTC allows the choice of only a finite number of approaches. University of Kansas found that “CTC’s claim of allowing communities the freedom to devise their own solutions is only partially accurate. Communities can create combinations of interventions that speak to their needs, but only from a limited pool of choices. ”

…”On the one hand, it presents…the security of set curricula … On the other, it can limit the possibilities for creativity and the use of local wisdom that might arise if there were more freedom of choice and the chance for the community to craft its own program.”

– “Choosing from among best practices may encourage communities merely to follow directions, rather than throwing heart and soul into the effort. Though it simplifies the process, it’s an intervention that’s laid out for the community, rather than built from the ground up… ”

–CTC is narrowly focused. CTC “implies taking a small-picture view of community health and development, and not necessarily planning for the long term or for the whole community. If the ultimate goals are as narrow as reducing one or more of the problem behaviors, they can give the impression that reaching those goals “fixes” the problem and the community. If the goal is the end of the process, there’s no community commitment to long-term social change. And long-term social change is usually needed to fully solve community problems.”

– “CTC is, to a certain extent, based on assumptions. While the theory behind it and the best practices have been subject to a fair amount of research, the program has only been shown to be effective in the short- to mid-term range. Long-term data have not yet been collected.”

– “CTC is sold as a package that includes literature, training, and support. While there are some obvious advantages to this, it also means that there can be less flexibility in the model than might be desirable… whether they’re the most appropriate or effective possibilities for the community or not.

Moving on from University of Kansas, I have made the following observations about some additional disadvantages of CTC:

3. CTC is owned by federal government; it makes us beholden to mandates and rules set by bureaucrats far from Heber City, long after the grant money has been spent.

4. CTC will require ongoing solicitation of federal funding or finding other grantors or raising of taxes to continue.

5. CTC adds a layer of bureaucracy and government salary.

6. CTC asks for archival and ongoing data to be collected and shared with the federal government. There may be serious data privacy concerns for some Heber citizens.

7. Most concerning of all to me is blind acceptance of the values embedded in the CTC training and youth surveys. They appear in some instances to indoctrinate with collectivism, and with specific biases that do not match my own, or may not match your own. (See youth survey questions.)

For example, on the risk factors page, it places drug abuse and alcohol abuse and availability of firearms in the same category, all labeled as risk factors for behavior problems. In Heber, a lot of teenagers shoot guns but they aren’t in gangs; they’re hunting deer or recreationally shooting targets. There’s a disconnect there. I quote two cited risk factors: one,

“Availability of firearms: Statistics show that the more available firearms are in a community, the higher the violent crime rates tend to be, and, conversely, fewer firearms in a community is correlated with lower violent crime rates.” [Yikes. Where do they get those nutty statistics? Ask a Swiss citizen!]

two:

Community laws and norms favorable to drug use, firearms, and crime. ”

–In the same sentence! Drugs, firearms and crime. Some are norms in Heber, some aren’t. That’s not going to give us accurate data. Nor will it give our kids the message we want to send them about firearms. Is it?

Another example. I quote this from CTC itself: “…The ideal here… is one where the community speaks with one voice about values and standards.” That sounds extremely collective. We should have many voices heard in our community. Not one. That’s always been the American way. Because if there’s only one voice, who gets to speak? Who gets to set those standards for our children– the federal government, or the people of Heber?

There’s also an “innocence alert” issue. What happens when very young children are exposed to these types of questions? Sometimes, that’s their first introduction to deviant behavior and it could have the opposite effect on some children of creating curiosity. On the youth survey, there are specific questions about drugs which would require a child to know the difference between prescription drugs and illegal drugs that I don’t even know.

I quote from the drugs cited in the youth survey. Do you know which of these are which? : adderall, LSD, peyote, psychedelics, PCP, ecstasy, vicodin, oxycontin, tylox, xanax, valium, ambien, methamphetamine, crank, meth, crystal meth, etc. And are you going to ask a 10 year old these questions?

One question there was how often the child had “Used prescription stimulants, such as Ritalin or Adderall without a doctors’s orders during the past 30 days?”

The question did not allow the child to say “I used it but it was actually 31 days ago,” or “What the heck is Adderall?” We can write better questions that are more appropriately crafted.

8. Examples of questions from the youth survey:

What are the chances you would be seen as cool if you a) smoked cigarettes b) began drinking alcoholic beverages regularly c) smoked cigarettes d) carried a handgun [umm… Shouldn’t this at least be an essay question? Should guns and alcohol both be in the same question? ]

–Used derbisol in your lifetime? [what the heck is derbisol and how do I mark a multiple choice quiz to say huh?]

We argue about the same things in my family over and over. [what a question. Is there any family in the world that never has a disagreement? What is the point of asking whether the disagreements vary or are about the same things? We should write our own survey at the very least, and make it essay based.

To many this seems noncontroversial, but in fact, in many places, anti-bullying legislation has been used to promote gay lifestyle acceptance via the protection of gays from bullying above any others who may be bullied. This may be an unfair bias, and carefully worded surveys may produce student results that try to legitimize what is actually a political agenda, not an agenda of equal compassion for all groups.

10. Under-utililizing our current resources – Heber City is overflowing with churches, schools, 12-step groups and other resources that stand ready to deal with youth problems.

Families and extended families

Heber City police

D.A.R.E. program

Church youth programs in many denominations

Long established 12-step groups

The WHS Cool To Care program

Wasatch District schools’ guidance counselors

Scouting and sporting programs

I spoke this week with the facilitator of one of the valley’s 12-step groups. He told me the groups have very small attendance for people of any age and need to be promoted. The groups welcome all religions, all ages as long as a parent attends if the addict is under age 18, and have separate groups for men and women. They have groups several times a week for groups that include sex addiction, drug abuse, and alcohol abuse.

Utah’s First Lady has been campaigning for EmpowerParents.Org, a Utah coalition designed to help parents learn how to keep their children from underage drinking. The organization gives parents resources

Groups that have joined and support EmpowerParents.Org include

Northeastern Counseling Center

Bear River Health Department

Davis Helps

Four Corners Behavioral Health

Tooele Valley Mental Health

Summit Valley Mental Health

Utah Substance Abuse and Anti-Violence

Weber Human Services

Associated Foods

Intermountain Healthcare

Larry H. Miller

Mothers Against Drunk Driving

O.C. Tanner

The Power In You

Utah Dental Association

Utah PTA

Salt Lake Police Dept.

Salt Lake County Sanitation

Utah Attorney General

–and many more

In closing, here are a list of questions we must answer before we move forward with CTC:

1. What will be our ongoing our obligations to the federal government for accepting the $10,000 and how will we pay for the program when the money runs out?

2. Do we want to use our current resources better, or do we want to add a layer of bureaucracy to implement this program, and then pay for that layer indefinitely, regardless of whether the program “works” or not?

3. Do the values embedded in the youth survey align with our own; for example, how do gun control, homosexuality, and family privacy issues come up in CTC?

4. What will be Heber’s ongoing “accountability” for the CTC program to the federal government, if it accepts the grant rather than paying for CTC ourselves?

5. Are there better, less expensive, more autonomous or higher quality alternatives Heber can choose to use, to work on youth drug use prevention and other important youth issues?

6.What will be the up-front and ongoing-maintenance costs to Heber City for adopting CTC?